On Time

Estimated Departure Date: 7 weeks and counting

Mike's been off work for three weeks now and cannot believe how little time there still is in a day. We've been SO BUSY. I'm trying to cram as much in-person work as possible before I go. Both of us are trying to cram in a year's worth of appointments. We're trying to see all of our friends at least once each before we go. We have to clean out as much of our stuff as possible, and sell a ton of stuff on Craigslist. Mike has a lot of his own personal projects he wants to work on. Eventually, we'll need to start figuring what to bring and what to leave behind, buy anything else we need for the RV, and make any modifications we need to make. And, the fun stuff, we're trying to cram in as many of the San Francisco must-dos before we go, too.

It's amazing how quickly the time flies, and how little of it there seems to be. 

We've hit the Premature Nostalgia phase, where we're starting to miss San Francisco before we even leave. We're trying to at least do all the SF things that we'd regret not doing if we left, one of which is taking swing dance classes which we now plan to do once a week until we go. We've also been exploring different neighborhoods, and hitting up a lot of the restaurants we've been meaning to go to. The exploration also leads to plenty of confrontations with the difficult things about San Francisco, too, though, all of which I will not miss. During these moments, despite the nostalgia, I look forward to a breath of fresh air that doesn't smell like pee.

And we're also starting to realize how much we'll miss all our friends. Our friends are awesome. I think that's going to be the hardest part about leaving.

As of right now, I don't have a night free for almost four solid weeks, and the days are almost as full. Mike's still sleep deprived, despite not having to get up to go to work every day. It's perplexing and chaotic but fun and exhilarating, and every day makes me more excited. 

"So how's the planning going?"

It's not. It's not going. But that's okay!

Since the last check-in, the following things have happened:

• Mike gave notice at work...
• But then has had to work approximately 90+ hours a week to get all his stuff done, and also go to China.
• Which means I'm working about the same, because I'm trying to prep my team for my being gone.
• Which means we have spent a total of zero minutes planning the trip.
• My parents moved from Bakersfield to San Diego, so we now get to spend a month in San Diego and skip Bakersfield entirely. I consider this a win. (No offense Bakersfield. But, kind of.)
• My bff is planning on moving from Austin to England, which... isn't exactly an easy detour. So again, less time in Texas.
• But we have had zero time to update the itinerary, nor even send nice emails to all of our loved ones politely asking them whether we can park in their driveways and use their bathrooms for a month at a time. This has also led to about a dozen awkward conversations that went like this:

Me, to someone I talk to ALL THE TIME and somehow haven't mentioned the trip to yet: <Fill in the blank such and such thing> won't really matter anymore soon, anyway, because of the trip.

Them: ...

Me: ...You know about the trip, right?

Them: What trip? Are you guys going to be traveling again?

Me: Oh, shoot... yeah! We're going to take a van trip around the country for a year!!

Them: WHAT. Why didn't you tell me??

Me: I'm so sorry! I thought I had!

Them: That's so awesome. When? Where are you going to go?

Me: Uh... well... so... can we stay at your place for a month in February?  Surprise!

Sorry, loved ones. But in our defense, our plan was to write you very nice letters about three months ago politely informing you that we'll be in your hometown and we'd love to spend time with you.

So the plan is, once work settles a little bit, itinerary will be updated, letters will be sent, and van will be procured! 

Route Planning

Mike spent hours yesterday planning and organizing our potential route.

Because the main goal of this trip is to create time to bond and spend quality time with our family, including the ones we haven't historically had many opportunities to really get to know, we're planning the main stops around all of the places where we have family. Which turns out to be a lot.

When we put those into the map, along with all of the places we'd like to sight-see and be tourists, it put our trip at 14 months! It's pretty difficult to decide how long to stay in each place. Even on such a long trip, there are so many places to go, and so many people we'd like to spend time with; it never feels like enough. And it's really hard to anticipate how we'll feel in each place, and how long we'll want to stay once we're actually there.

Mike would like to stay a full six weeks at his family's cabin in Michigan. I've never even been there, so it's hard to know whether I'll find it peaceful and relaxing or whether I'll get stir crazy and feel isolated if we're there for so long. I'm hoping we can convince some family and friends to come visit us up there; that would be a blast.

We also realized that, after Chicago, there are no specific places we need to be or people we need to see, so there's no point in planning where we go after that. We can either keep going, and hit Wyoming, Seattle, Portland. Or we can come back to San Francisco and try to do those places later. Or we can go back to places we want to revisit, like places where my family lives, since at that point it'll have been almost a year since I saw them last. Or we might even decide to move somewhere else to settle down!

As of now, with the tentative route we've laid out, we'd be leaving in Oct 2017, hitting Texas for Christmas, Atlanta in March 2018, the cabin in July, and ending in Chicago in September.

Uploaded by Tinker Trailer on 2017-09-03.